Category: KOREA

… In Which America Learns Something Interesting about Psy (and South Korea)

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After years of South Koreans asking me, “Are you American?” and then acting all relieved or happy when I tell them, no, I’m Canadian, I can’t help but be amused at the newest news report on Psy. Apparently some journalists in America have realized that he’s expressed raging bigotry in his songs performances in the past, to the tune of: 이라크 포로를 고문해 댄 씨발양년놈들과 고문 하라고 시킨 개 씨발 양년놈들에 딸래미 애미 며느리 애비 코쟁이 모두 죽여 아주 천천히 죽여 고통스럽게 죽여 Here’s a more representative translation of those lyrics, by the way: Kill those fucking Yankees who have been …

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Lesson Plan: The Caper!

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Back when I first came to Korea, there was a lesson I created on the spur of the moment, after observing how little security there seemed to be on the little minivans that drove around in Iksan putting money into bank machines. (I had such fun talking over strategies for robbing one of these vans with a group of expats that I thought I’d see how my students fared.) Over the years, the exercise has shifted and changed slightly. Finally, this past year, after a brush with Jason Morningstar’s wonderful Fiasco RPG, I expanded it a little to include an …

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What I’ve Learned About Crises, or How My Vaguest Shadow of a Doubt Died Today…

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It’s been snowing heavily the last couple of days in my area. The thing about snowstorms–like other crises–is that they reveal a lot. It’s difficult to gauge the stability of a system in normal times, though of course you can guess. But a crisis, that lays bare a lot. Now, when I say it’s been snowing “heavily” allow me to adjust that comment: I don’t know what’s fallen so far, but the prediction for was 10cm, which just barely qualifies as heavy. (And today’s snow certainly was not heavy, though it was constant.) So… why did one of my colleagues (wisely) …

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A Bizarre Underground Industry, or, When Good Restaurants Go Bad

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So, I’ve long wondered why, outside of Seoul, so many good restaurants were able to stay running for so long while in the big city, it seems like good places almost always either shut down or drop precipitously in quality within a year or two. Now I think I know why. Now, I’m not a food blogger, and I don’t know if they’ve discussed this publicly. If they have, I’d be curious to see a link. One of the reasons I don’t really read food blogs is because they mostly just review restaurants, or talk about the politics of marketing …

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On Modernizing/Adapting Myths, James Bond as Odysseus, and On the Undead Archetype

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Sometimes, when you’re teaching, you learn things. The other day, in my Greek Mythology and Biblical Narrative course, we had a discussion interesting enough that I feel like I learned a few interesting things. Figured I’d share: On Modernizing/Adapting Myths: In class, I was discussing the idea of archetypal figures with students in my mythology course, in the context of adapting ancient Greek mythology to a modern setting. We were specifically discussing their homework from a week before, which involved writting up synopses of their own for an imaginary adaptation of The Odyssey to a modern (post-1950) Korean setting. (They’d just …

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Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, and Some Thoughts on Culture-Specific Modes of Reading

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Last semester, a student of mine gave me a paperback copy of the English translation of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin. It was a very kind gesture, and I appreciated it very much. This whole culture of gifting professors–sometimes before exams, which is a little uncomfortable, but more often after–is rather nice. I’ll be honest, though: while some mainstream Korean literature I’ve found enjoyable, a lot of it leaves me kind of cold, for reasons that remind me of things my own students say when I ask them to interpret texts. I find that the standard mode of …

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The 정 Challenge

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This evening, Miss Jiwaku and I had a conversation with some of her relatives. These particular relatives are very nice and very decent people, good folks. But there was a line in the conversation that got me, where someone said, “But you know, as nice or polite as people in other countries might be to one another, Koreans have something unique… they have jeong.” If you haven’t run into this idea, jeong, well, then you apparently haven’t talked to many South Koreans. It gets translated variously as “harmony” or “coexistence” or all kinds of other things that sound, well, nice, but …

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New Term: “White Endorsement Monkey” and “White Defamation Monkey”

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Well, I’ve googled it and don’t see it out there, so I’m going to call dibs and coin this term: White Endorsement Monkey. What is a White Endorsement Monkey? Well, if you’re a white person living abroad, you might experience this. I certainly have experienced it in Korea. Don’t get me wrong: as stomach turning and ass-kissing as this book cover looks to me: … I’m not calling this author a White Endorsement Monkey, because I’m not actually talking about what foreigners themselves do — but rather to a pressure that is sometimes imposed on non-Koreans by some Koreans. That …

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Linkery, Linkery…

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I have a huge list of links marked “to post” which, to be honest, I find kind of daunting. I used to post links a lot more, but lately my blog is mostly devoted to housing my ongoing project, Blogging Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, along  with occasional posts on SF or Korea-related issues. But I have had a few tabs open on my browser for over a week, which seem worth posting to me, and having been delayed for my critique group’s meeting by an annoying fridge-related disaster (though less delayed than another member), I am now sitting in a …

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On “Mythology” versus “Truth”: Bulfinch on the Bible and Pagan “Myths”

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Most semesters I have a last-minute class. It’s characteristic in Korea for things to be done at the last minute, including scrambling to find someone to teach a new or otherwise “specialized” course. Of course, teaching a new course takes a lot of preparation… but in every case where I’ve taught a new class, I’ve had it dropped in my lap (with my tacit acceptance, yes) at the last minute. What this adds up to is me being on a constant crash course every semester; one semester, it was the intersections of politics, business, and culture. Another semester, it was …

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